Monthly Archive:: April 2009

Microsoft's Surface computer is a revolutionary table-top multitouch computer that can do all sorts of fancy tricks. It makes use of a projector and five cameras to track hand movements, as well as read "Surface tags", which are a sort of barcodes underneath objects. It's a software+hardware package, and for 17000 USD, you'd think it'd be a treat to unbox and install one. Well, no. Near-instant update: Microsoft has replied to the blog post, and as it turns out, the unit delivered to Miller for one of his clients was scheduled to be setup by Microsoft - a service that comes standard with the device. More details inside.

Qt Software (formerly Trolltech) released a new version of Qt SDK. Qt 4.5.1 includes bugfixes and optimizations made since the release of Qt 4.5.0. The list of changes can be found here. Qt Creator has been updated to reflect the feedback gathered since the initial release. A full list of changes is here. Finally, after two betas and an RC, Qt Software released the final version of the Visual Studio add-in. It is now available for download.

"In a recent report, AdMob said growth in requests from devices running the Android and iPhone operating systems continued to outpace other platforms in March, despite the relatively limited number of devices in the market. The HTC Dream (Google G1) generated 72 million requests, giving it a 2 percent share of the overall U.S. market in March."

A common concern when it comes to Linux on netbooks is that, well, they're hard to get your hands on, and even if you do find one, they often feature lower specifications than their Windows brethren. If yuo fear the situation will be similar for nettops, fear no longer: Acer has given out pricing and specification information on its Revo NVIDIA Ion nettop (the first Ion-based machine on the market), and there's good news for Linux fans.

During the conference call yesterday about Apple's financial results, COO Tim Cook reiterated Apple's negative stance towards the netbook market. While many of us might want to see a relatively cheap Apple netbook with Mac OS X, all the recent figures do seem to confirm that it simply isn't a good idea for Apple.

Apple just posted their intriguing news of hitting one billion app downloads, and all in nine months. Apparently, they're also handing out prizes, but the window of entering for the celebratory winnings is obviously closed. Alas. As a note of interest, one billion in nine months equals out to be about 110 million a month, 27 million a week, and a little less than four million a day.

"As analysts predicted it might, Microsoft on Thursday reported the company's first ever year-over-year sales decline for the quarter ended March 31. The software maker said fiscal third-quarter sales totaled $13.65 billion, down 6 percent compared with $14.45 billion in the same quarter a year ago. Its per-share earnings were 33 cents per share, although that included severance and investment impairment charges that reduced earnings by 6 cents per share. Analysts had been projecting sales of $14.15 billion and per-share earnings of 39 cents, down from 47 cents a year ago, according to Reuters Estimates. Microsoft had said in January that the crystal ball for the company was cloudy and at the time announced its first companywide layoffs, with plans to chop 5,000 jobs over an 18-month period."

GCC 4.4.0 has been released. There are many interesting changes, including the merge of the Graphite branch, which is "a new framework for loop optimizations based on a polyhedral intermediate representation", improved support of the upcoming C++0x standard, and a new register allocator.

The verdict in the Pirate Bay trial surprised many people, seeing as how many errors the entertainment industry's lawyers had made, and how little understanding they seemed to have of how BitTorrent works. The height of the sentence also surprised many; for aiding in sharing just 33 copyrighted items, the four founders were sentenced to one year in jail, and a massive fine of 3.6 million USD. Well, as it turns out, we now know why we were all relatively surprised: the judge in the case, Thomas Norstrom, is member of the same pro-copyright groups as many of the people representing the entertainment industry in the case.

You may recall the recent OSNews article about Linux Fund getting donations to supply developers with OGD1 boards. (OGD1 is a what you might call an "open source graphics card," with all designs, documentation and source code available under Free Software licenses. Technically, however, OGD1 is an FPGA-based prototyping platform with memory and video encoders on it. See the wikipedia article.) Since then, the FSF got involved and is asking for volunteers to help with the OGP wiki. The OGP had shown OGD1 driving a graphics display back in 2007 at OSCON. And now, the OGP has just announced technical success with the rather difficult challenge of emulating legacy VGA text mode. They even put up a video on YouTube of a display, driven by OGD1, showing a PC booting into Gentoo.

Researchers at security firm Finjan have uncovered a massive botnet of Windows machines. The botnet is 1.9 million machines strong, with many of the machines located in the United States: 45% of them are located in the US. The researchers detailed their findings at the RSA Conference in San Fransisco.

I's time for another "OSNews Asks", a blatant rip-off of just about every other website in existence. Anyway, today we want to focus on multitouch. The technology behind it has existed for a long time, but only recently have companies like Apple (iPhone, trackpads) and Microsoft (Surface, Windows 7) begun promoting it. We have a question for you, about multitouch in desktops and laptops.

"Btrfs holds the promise of giving Linux many enterprise class file system features similar to ZFS but with even more features and better performance. In fact, many Linux experts think that btrfs is one of the keys to the future of Linux. While btrfs is not quite ready to be your only file system, it is in the kernel ready for testing and is still undergoing very heavy development. In this article we will introduce the key features of btrfs find out how it compares to existing file systems."

EDE (Equinox Desktop Environment) is a desktop environment for UNUX-like operating systems. Main features of EDE are speed and responsiveness, low resource usage and familiar look and feel. "This is the first major 2.0 release, after three years of working on it. It comes with a lot of the new stuff and code, but the most important are replacing eFLTK usage with FLTK, introducing brand new edelib library and syncing with the freedesktop.org standards."